This week’s session we were commended on the Leeds met journalism Facebook group for being one of the best blogs. I found this inspiring and it gave me a push to want to do more.

We have also being focusing on trying to make our post as primary as possible. We do this by using our own material.

We have also been making videos ourselves and ensuring most pictures we use are our own where possible.

Together with this we have set up our own twitter page for eyes on the pies which we have linked to our page.

I’m also finding were getting a lot of views. I know some of the other girls in the group and myself have received feedback from visitors on our posts. One of mine said ‘ if I’m not a famous blogger now I will be in the future’!

One difficulty I am finding though now is getting the time to put ll my effort into producing three good posts a week as well as keeping up with all my other work.

Apart from that were all still getting along very well, our pieces tend to complement each other and most importantly were having a laugh whilst we doing it which is making the experience more enjoyable.

We now have a fifth member of our group. Sam Iicia an American exchange student who is lovely.

Only problem is we now need to think of MORE ideas to write about.

We’re aiming for 3 posts each a week, so that now a total of 15 posts per week. Because of this we have decided to change our demographics. Instead of just writing based around the west Yorkshire area, we’re now including our home towns/cities and everywhere else.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to this week’s session but I caught up with the girl in my group after.

It was only Aimee and Camilla that were available, so they filled me in on what had been done.

Over the past week in other module lectures we had decided we were going to stick with the idea of the food blog.

Although we didn’t have to money to dedicate to dining out together all the time for our blog, we could however just write about our day-to-day experiences with food. Meals out with family, friends and boyfriends, successful/unsuccessful recipes we tried at home and just blog about deals and promotions we find out about.

Our only concern was that these topics may not be news worthy enough, this is something we would have to come back to as we all began to blog.

Aimee and Camilla came up with the name for our blog being ‘ Eyes on the Pies’ which we all immediately LOVED!

Our target demographic would be non-students, between the ages of 18-30 and live in the west Yorkshire area.

In our group would be Camilla Andrews, Aimee Johnstone, Sarah Newlove and Myself.

We had already played around with the idea of a food blog and decided this was a common interest we all shared…we all like eating lots of food!

With us being students we were unsure how we would get around the fact that none of us have the money to gallivant around Leeds dinning in its finest restaurants, nor did we have critic status that would let us trial the food for free. This something we would need to think about further!

We hadn’t even begun, but we were already excited to start blogging! (and about the food).

We had ideas of every week baking cookies and excuse to eat out together…but it soon became apparent, this wasn’t the reality of the task.

This is where Karl (my tutor) and I sat down to assess my personal blog so far and how successful it is.

I was actually pretty nervous!

Karl looked at elements of my blog such as the layout, aesthetics and my content, and told me ways in which I could improve.

The positive points that were picked up on included my presentation. Although my paragraphs were short and punchy and my posts were broken up with headings and pictures, I still needed to improve on this.

I would do this by rearranging my posts so my picture came higher up in the post after my first paragraph or so.

Another element of my blog that needed corrected was my spelling and grammar. This is just something I can go back on before the hand in date, but we also discussed I might be better drafting my posts in a word document and copying and pasting the content into word press. This will make it easier because Word will pick up on spelling and Grammar mistakes and most likely correct them automatically.

This session has definitely helped me, and will also steer me in the right direction for the group task.